Podcasting

Arguably the greatest radio programme ever broadcast on the wireless was ‘Letter from America’.  Every week, the veteran broadcaster and journalist Alistair Cooke would speak for a quarter of an hour about an aspect of Americana.  It had that magical combination that only radio can provide, the intimacy of a single voice, broadcast to millions and speaking only to you, with a charismatic and talented speaker saying something meaningful.  Letter from America was broadcast on the BBC, to a British audience and was, as the name suggests, about life in the US.  It was on air for as long as I can remember but the episode that means the most to me, and I guess to many millions of others, was an anecdote about JFK’s rocking chair.

I heard that broadcast driving along the motorway on a wintry night, and recall Cooke’s supremely soft voice and the rattle of grit bouncing from the bonnet of my car as I passed a gritter lorry.  It seemed to me, driving through that darkness on that night that Cooke, speaking about a night-firing exercise by the US Navy being observed by the then President, was speaking directly to me.

The internet has, for good or ill, revolutionised communication.  Now, anyone who has the means and the inclination can record their thoughts on any subject and, within the bounds of anti-extremism legislation and good taste, make it available to anyone who chooses to read, watch or listen.

This revolution has grown with the bandwidth available to folk, and the sophistication of the tools at their disposal.

Back in the day when you had to plug your computer into a telephone socket and dial up the internet, text downloaded a lot more quickly than images and so the blog, or weblog, became popular.  There was a time when to have one’s diary made public would mean social mortification, but the first internet privacy shift began when people began recording what they were up to, and in some case who they were up, for public consumption.  Book deals were done as a result, legitimising the blog as the gateway to a writing career with those who had the talent and saucy content to interest a wide enough audience.

Youtube has, of course, given us the video blog, essentially a talking head or heads discussing a subject dear to them and, they hope, to others.  This can range from arguing about Star Trek, to arguing about Doctor Who, to arguing about the Marvel Cinematic Universe.  Of course, it could be that there are other sorts of vlogs out there, but I know what I like and I am buggered if I am going to waste my time getting professional make-up tips that I am unlikely ever to use.

Want to make believe that you are the handsome and popular host of a television programme, trusted by millions to come into their homes every night and give your opinions about cultural matters, or talk about vegan stuff, then the vlog is the vehicle for you, and you can do it all from your smartphone.

But it is the podcast that has emerged as the greatest beneficiary of the internet’s merging with media.

Anyone of a certain age will have had the shared experience of trying to make their own radio programme, on cassette.  This was slightly different to recording the charts, where the editing process consisted of trying to press record to minimise any sound of a DJ talking over the track, or your family bickering in the background.  Rather, you would use a cassette and record and record your own links.  This would be done in a state of feverish excitement that lasted until the first time you heard your own voice played back to you.  Surely the technology must be defective, as the tinny whine emanating from the speakers was the voice of a little kid, not the smooth tones of a superstar DJ.

If you were wise, you destroyed that tape kid.

Now, we have a whole recording studio on our smartphones, our voices have broken, and we have something to say.

It’s not a radio broadcast, it’s not a cassette narrowcast, it’s a podcast.

Little Donnie

In the last G&P post there was a thinly (ironic) veiled pop at the sort of people (fat people) who are targeted by those wishing to push New Year diets.  This is because overweight people are easy targets, both for those who would exploit them to make them purchase stuff, or for arseholes like me who mock human weakness.
However, anyone who picks up one of those diet plans has something special.
Self awareness.
Now self awareness is a precious and arguably increasingly rare character trait.  If you have been in a train carriage with somebody that either does not realise that their telephone contains the same technology that allows a whisper on stage to go to the back of the auditorium and so they do not have to conduct their conversation at a volume more suited to bellowing out of the carriage window in the hope their mate will hear them, or does not care that he is sharing his test results with a carriage of commuters slowly edging away from him, then you will know that self awareness, like doffing your hat, is a vanishing art.  I blame social media.  And arseholes.
Speaking of which, L’ill Donnie.
Self awareness appears to be as remote from L’ill Donnie as, well, let’s be blunt about this, gentlemanly behaviour.
There, I’ve said it.
What. A. Guy.
One, occasionally, wonders how the…and here I struggle, he’s clearly no gentleman, he’s not a chap, nor is he a fellow, he is certainly not a bloke.  I think that we shall describe him as a ‘guy’.
We don’t say his name, lest we summon him.
Also ‘that steak of shit that a fox leaves when it has had a bad chicken dinner from the bins’ may be accurate, but is rather lengthy.
OK, so, one wonders how L’ill Donnie got elected.  Surely there can’t be that many racist, sexist, stupid arseholes in the US?  I’ve been there, and the people are lovely.
That said, I was pretty amazed that England voted to Brexit.
I genuinely thought that the only reason you would vote to Brexit is that you had been to an agricultural fair on polling day, and a Shire Horse had shied at a Punch and Judy show, as we all might, happening possibly near a toddler, you had sought to restrain the horse, it kicks you.  Concussed, you fell into a replica threshing machine, more concussion, then you wandered into a polling booth and mark the wrong box.
Now, that might excuse the actions of a couple of thousand ‘Leave’ voters, but really, what were the others thinking?  ‘I can make some money out of this’ will do, if you know you can, but for the rest, really?
L’ill Donnie though, is truly repulsive.  The guy (let’s stick with guy) appears to communicate by social media, Twatter, specifically.  And this is quite appropriate really, because the guy is a troll, and when I say troll I don’t mean the goat loving creatures that dwell beneath bridges, I don’t even mean the lurkers who use the internet to try and intimidate others, I mean the plastic toys that were popular in the seventies and eighties and had crazy hair.
This guy appears to have no self awareness, or wish to improve.
Don is of course the title of a criminal academic at Oxford University who is exposed as a vile and beastly type by Inspector Morse.
Don is also, according to my viewings of ‘The Godfather’, the head of a crime family.  This, I think, is probably the most appropriate analogy.
However, there are noble Dons.  Quixote.  Here was a fellow who was quite delusional and thought himself a defender of the people, but was just tilting at windmills. L’ill Donnie is nothing like the noble Quixote.  Quixote managed to hold onto his loyal staff, and in his heart was a good man.
Don Amott.  King of caravans.  Growing up in the Midlands one had the privilege, if one watched commercial television, of witnessing the magnificence of the adverts for Don Amott.
The most magnificent jingle of all time.  Including that time they hung that peado Morris-man outside the Hop Pole in Droitwich.

Toby Keith - Red, White and blueneck

Vietnam was the first televised war, and the first time many people saw that iconic image from the inside of a Chinook helicopter sweeping low over a combat zone, a lone crewman standing, silhouetted, ready by the open tailgate as the jungle wheels below. 

Successive conflicts have changed the landscape glimpsed out of the tailgate, but not the image, or the message; if you are a bad guy, the very, very best you can hope for is that they’ve rigged up a tail-gun and you are about to be sprayed with bullets, the alternative is that the thing is going to touch down on it’s rear end, rearing up like a begging dog or a prancing stallion depending on how you like your imagery, and a bunch of hard-ass soldiers are going to pour out of that tail gate, determined on making your life interesting for the next few minutes.  That’s a moment that’ll have you revaluating your life choices. (Remember kids, pick-up trucks are for transporting lumber and dogs, not weapons or youths in flip-flops carrying automatic weapons).

General rule, you had better be terrified of whatever comes out of the back end of a Chinook, and yes friends, that includes country singer Toby Keith strumming his guitar in the video for ‘Courtesy of the red, white and blue’.  Because Toby Keith has weaponised folk music.

I first heard of this chap way back, when his video ‘I wanna talk about me’ was featured on Jonathan King’s (a teevee personality judged to be so odious that he was convicted of being a nonce or whatever many years before Yewtree was even set up) show ‘Entertainment USA’.  But it took twenty years and a global act of terrorism before I heard another of his songs, ‘Beer for my horses, whisky for my men’.  Thanks to Youhootube, I was able to see what else the guy had been up to.

Keith is, it would appear, the epitome of a country rock star.  His songs, at least the ones that are popular on Hoooeeeeeetube are either rich with folksy charm (‘I love this bar’ is about, well, take a wild guess, and ‘Trailerhood’ is an affectionate tribute to those sorts of communities that can be regarded as ‘tornado fodder’) or essentially pissed off promises to kick bad-guy ass, of which ‘Courtesy of the red white and blue’ is probably the best example.

Country is an interesting medium.  In terms of sentimentality, only one other music genre comes close – hip-hop.  Who can fail to be moved by the exhortation to put the bonds of friendship before carnal desire or even romantic attachment (or possibly gardening equipment) or, as it’s so neatly encapsulated, bro’s before hoes?

Country music allows men to sing with real feeling about the sort of things that men feel passionately about but, as men, are not allowed to express feelings about, and ignore completely those asinine things that men, generally, do get overly worked up about in public.  This is why there are great country songs about family, home and every variation of woman trouble known to man but, thankfully, none about football.

It’s also the music of the cowboy, the tree with a convenient branch, the length of rope and the hemp fandango, in short, frontier justice.  Keith does righteously-pissed-off really, really well.  If you were about to jump out of the back of a Chinook to give the sort of arsehole who thinks kidnapping schoolgirls is a proper occupation for a man, you’d probably not have ‘Courtesy’ on your iPod for the simple reason that you’d want to set your rifle down and settle the thing with your bare hands, but I bet it makes a hell of a tune to get everyone singing on the way back from a successful mission.  He channels the sort of baffled anger many people feel when they watch some atrocity unfolding on the news, and conveys perfectly that guys who love their bar and their trailerhood are the very, very last people to annoy, because when they saddle up and start rolling, God help the unjust.  Shakespeare had something to say about self-depreciating hard-asses in Henry V, but Keith’s take on it isn’t bad.

Of course, if you want a really angry singer, you need to listen to Bruce Springsteen’s ‘Wrecking Ball’.  It sounds like he recorded the entire album after somebody took away his punchbag and his medication, simply astonishing.

Postcard from New York - Food

I don't know if they are representative of Americans in general, but New Yorkers seem to have an odd relationship with their food, testing it more like fuel, or something to be suffered, than something to be savoured and enjoyed. While were were there there was a programme on the telly called 'Man vs food' where the premise is that the presenter travels around America taking part in the various eating challenges that exist there. Not of the 'how many hot dogs can you gulp in a minute' variety but rather the ones run by eating places where, if you eat the enormous sandwich, you get it and a ride to the hospital for free sort of thing. I can say that the American approach to food hinges on portion size. The first place we ate in, 'The Edison', apparently specialised in theatre dinners and I thought we would be OK for a quick meal. Not quite. Look, it might be fancy in NYC to cook proper chips instead of spindly French fries, but knocking up something that any self respecting pissed up Glasweigan could do in an instant on any night of the week and passing it off as a speciality is taking the piss. As were the tinned vegetables.


Americans seem to equate portion size with how good a meal is, rather than quality. A friend who spent some time in the city commented afterwards that they learned that the less that was on your plate, the better the food was going to be. My plate was piled high with turkey smothered in gravy. Even after going at it for half an hour I had barely made a dent. Partly because there was just so much of it, partly because it wasn't great. Obviously, I would be crap as the presenter of 'Man vs food' (which has in it's titles a graphic of a man punching a sandwich. Cute.). Unless, of course, 'Man vs food' is cleverly edited so that he always wins. Maybe I'm not the target viewer, but i don't see that the object of visiting a restaurant should be a struggle to clean your plate. What I would like to see is if the fat fuck exploded or destroyed his loo or something the next day, or a combination of the two. Death by exploding arse. That would make me watch, host mortality.

The odd thing is that you walk past loads of delis that are stuffed with exotic oils and decent looking food. I assume that, lacking a supermarket in the centre of this busy city and having seen no grocery delivery vans puttering around, New Yorkers do a daily rather than a weekly shop from their local grocer. In a space constrained city, this would also make sense as it means that you don't have that particular English affliction of a fridge and freezer full of food after the Saturday shop, and a fridge devoid of anything tasty by Friday.


One place we ended up eating in turned out to be one of a chain of organic restaurants. The decor is all stripped pine, school chairs and refractory tables where you may have to sit down side by side with a stranger. It's odd that the decor should reflect the food in a way that suggests that just because something is organic, its austere and almost a form of punishment. Obviously these people have never tried an organic bacon double cheeseburger.

Postcard from New York City - Staten Island Ferry

Ah, the heady smell of diesel, commerce and commuting. Commuting by ferry brings a touch of glamour to what can be a very mundane process, especially of your journey takes you past an iconic landmark such as the statue of liberty, on a journey to or from an iconic skyline.


You can tell who the locals are. When I caught the hydrofoil across the bay of Naples from Naples to Sorrento I was running around like a loon with my camera, trying to capture the views. The locals were more interested in their books. So it was the case here also. Tourists rushed from port to starboard and back again to take in the view, while real commuters either sat inside in the warm or were content to sit in the chill winter sunshine ignoring the view.

Riding an iconic piece of transport immortalised in movies past one of the most famous landmarks in the world, you realise that the city is genuinely woven from a collection of landmarks and icons. All that was missing was a giant monkey.

At Staten Island everyone rushed off the ferry, round the terminal and straight onto the next ferry back. The ferry out had a hurricane deck, which is something you don't expect to see on a commuter ferry, the one back did not, so everyone was on at the open space at the front. It was so cold that I lost all feel in my head and had to keep touching my nose to see if it was running, for fear of an icicle forming. And the ferry is free! I was astonished. I wasted five minutes looking for a ticket office at the terminal, not quite believing it.

The weather the whole time was cold and with brilliant sunshine. The mains of the snowfall were piled up in Cental Park. You could tell it had really, really snowed here.

Walked back uptown via the site of the World Trade Centre, which is at once bigger and smaller than you'd think. Smaller because everything around it now is so neat and tidy, you can't imagine it was the site of such destruction. And people live there, continue to live there, in the neighbouring streets. That amazed me. We were sat at a cafe and a school bus stopped and let off the kids, and they looked ordinary kids, not rich kids, living in apartments one block from the most expensive property in Manhattan. This happens in London of course, with council flats dotted around the centre of town, but you just wouldn't get ordinary people living next door to the city skyscrapers. It really came home that when the towers came down, there was nowhere to run to. If you ran for a minute you'd be at a river. Best haul your ass uptown and don't stop for Starbucks. And it's bigger because, once again, New Yorkers are seeing just now many skyscrapers the can put on one block. The answer here is 'a lot'. Apparently there are so many skyscrapers in the because New York is on granite. London is on clay, hence spreading out rather than up. Try building a skyscraper on loam and before you know it you have a bungalow with a lot of basements.

Stopped at the 9/11 gift shop (yes, really) and picked up the obligatory NYPD and FDNY tee shirts. Bought wrong size, XXXL. American XXXL at that. The bloody thing could have sheltered a family of five, or a Rangers fan.


Back to exchange the next day, the last in the city. This gave me an excuse to check out Greenwich Village, the only area of the city not to be laid out in a grid, meaning I promptly got lost. This was, I think, one of the nicest parts of new York, it has a more intimate and laid back atmosphere.

Postcard from New York City - sport

As well as doing a suicide dog, another tick box experience was to go an see a Rangers game while in New York. Ice hockey always looks so dangerous and glamorous and what could be better than seeing a local team in action. The reality was that by eight o clock in the evening I was knackered and so was flopping on the bed with barely enough strength to flick the remote, never mind scream encouragement or abuse at ice skaters while using the word 'puck' as often as possible because I like the way it feels in my mouth. The Rangers game was actually televised and maybe it was the jet lag but the reality of an ice hockey game is: loads of blokes in body armour, zooming about randomly chasing a puck that is too quick and too small to be seen, while the goal is defended by a bloke with shin pads so huge that when he brings them together, they form a perfect seal over the goal. With no real sport to be had it is no wonder that the players seem to spend most of the match attempting to beat up on one another. This in itself is pretty comical as they all have huge mittens on and are all wearing more body armour than a medieval knight. Still, it's the thought that counts.

The actual Rangers fans I saw outside Madison Square Gardens ahead of the game though, looked like the real deal. These guys were wearing their replica Rangers shirts which fitted them snugly despite them not wearing any body armour at all. They were the size of trucks and looked like they had real jobs, the sort that result in nicknames. Jobs like punching the cows to death in the slaughterhouse when the humane killer is out of order, so earning themselves nicknames like 'The Bolt'.

Postcard from New York City - Modern art

The Museum Of Modern Art is one of the must sees of NYC. It's an interesting visit, even if for the European visitor the two top floods are a waste of space, containing as they do a collection of impressionist works that are better curated in the shows they visit in London. Still, in a city of strangers it was good to see a familiar face or two (or a familar bottom or two in the case of the Rubens) and, to be fair, there is at least one exceptional Barbara Hepworth on display.

The oddest thing about American galleries (after you get over the fact that you don't have to pay for an audio guide, which I think is great and a policy UK galleries should adopt at once - having coughed up thirty quid to peer at a daub through a crowed of other visitors, I'm not sure I am in the mood to fork out a fiver to hear John Nettles giving me a lecture on how the artist expired of syphilis in a Danish brothel), is that the public are allowed to take photographs of the pictures. As long as they don't flash, which is good because there are quite enough nudes on the walls as it is. And people do. They not only take pictures of pictures, but take close ups of pictures, presumably to be used as one of those 'what famous painting is this a detail from' questions in their pub quiz, or have pictures of themselves taken standing beside a painting, as if you would beside any other landmark.

The gear delight of the museum is the collection of Warhols. I've never really appreciated Warhole before but, having spent even a little bit of time in the city you can see that they have the same sort of cheeky energy as the city itself, a mixture of commerciality and icon.


Not to be outdone by the smaller Whitney across town, the MOMA had it's own disturbing painting: 'Christina's world'. No wonder writers flock to New York, you are never stuck for inspiration. Every street corner would fill a notebook and a visit to a gallery is not unlike flicking through the bumper book of creative writing questions where you have to compose a short story based on the picture above.

The cafe on the top floor of the MOMA delivers a new twist on catering to hungry gallery goers. Because it's in close proximity to the paintings, they don't cook hot food! Luckily, soup was a loophole. I was betting that even new Yorkers couldn't screw up soup, especially with so many paintings of the damn stuff hanging downstairs, and was right.





It was delicious, and very orange. As was my beer, which had a slice of orange in it also. Which was interesting.


The beer on draft was your typical che che artisan brewery type light beer, which the Americans do very, very well, turning out seemingly endless versions of beers with a distinctive flavour that are a pleasure to drink in a way that six pints of Stella on a Friday night are not. But the wedge of orange on the glass? Were they taking the piss?


Highlight of the MOMA was the trio of pictures detailing how the 'I heart N Y' logo came into being. Lowlight, a painting that was black. The audio guide then told you to look at it and you could see it was different shades of black. Indeed it was, you could make out different shades of black if you looked at it for about thirty seconds. That's half a minute of my life wasted, because even when you can see the different shades it's still a black painting and it's still toss. Suspect the artist was crap and painting flowers.

Evening comes early to certain sections of NYC. If you are in the shadow of a skyscraper (and unless you're on an even taller skyscraper, almost everybody is) you can expect to see your last sunlight around about the same time you finish your breakfast.

Postcard from New York City - Iconography

NYC is enormous. Although you can walk a block in a minute, there is block after block after block, and the city expands vertically as well as horizontally. Other cities may have their showpiece spires and single tall buildings but New York has hundreds of the bloody things. Block after block after block of skyscraper and money. Each block looks, if not the same, then similar. When I visited many New Yorkers looked the same too, in that they had enormous puffa jackets, scarfs and hats on. This is not a fashion statement, New York is a coastal city on the Atlantic with no Gulf Stream to keep it cosy and is bloody cold.

Each corner has a hot dog cart on it and although I had promised myself that I'd have a hot dog off a street vendor in new York as an 'experience', the phrase 'suicide dog' kept going through my head and I bottled it.

One of the most constant images in new York, on it's way to becoming an icon like the yellow cab or statue of liberty, is the Starbucks coffee cup. Not only was every second person in the street walking along with a bucket sized Starbucks cup in their hand, but our hotel was 'proud to serve' Starbucks coffee in the restaurants and even the tea making facilities had Starbucks paper cups, well, beakers more like, rather than china cups. New Yorkers love their Starbucks so much that they actually take their Starbucks coffee into restaurants. In two places I saw people sitting eating with a Starbucks coffee beaker next to them. That's one trend that I can't see catching on in London, although having tasted the food in NYC I can see the attraction of taking your own food and drink into a restaurant and treating it as you would a picnic area.

On the sidewalks though, every second person has their Starbucks in their hand as they walk along. Actually, it's more like amble along, strolling to work at half nine in the morning. This might give a clue as to why America's title as an economic superpower is slipping. While the suits are walking down Forty Third street to work, slurping from their their bucket of latte, Shen Zhao has been at his desk for ten hours already. In fact he doesn't sleep, he doesn't have a bucket of coffee, he's got a bucket of black market amphetamines supplied to him by his bosses.

Postcard from New York City - Art

The hotel charges for wi fi! Where the hell are we, Paris? In the wooly wilds of Norfolk you go into a pub with wi fi and ask for the password and you get it, here in the Westin you are expected to pay an extra charge? That might have been acceptable, just, in 1998 but not today. At least the view is free. The Mandarin Oriental has a much more enlightened approach, simply asking you for your room number and password. If it works like it did in the hotel in Dublin, wi fi is included in the price of your room.

Or possibly I'm missing something. New York is all about making money after all and if you gave away your wi fi you'd not only lose out on that charge but also on any money you might make charging for your adult entertainment channels. A hotel, I suppose, has a right to ensure that they can continue to make a dime from those traditional bastions of adult entertainment, porn flicks and kickbacks from hookers.

Walked through Central Park. There are play areas dotted around the outside edge so that New Yorkers don't have to walk across the park to let their kids have a go on the swings. Presumably this means that the kids are in no danger of mixing with kids from other, potentially rougher, neighbourhoods. Because Christ alone knows it's bad enough that your toddler has started using Romanian it's picked up from the nanny without learning Spanish curse words too.


The Alice in wonderland statue is impressive and also surprisingly sinister, the Mad Hatter in particular looks like a demented ken Dodd, with enough teeth to give an ivory poacher a hard-on for a month. The giant mushroom is shiny at the front, where millions of children have polished the bronze with their bums.


Spent the morning in the Whitney gallery, home to the largest collection of Edward Hopper paintings in the world. Seen in the flesh, or rather in the pigment, the paintings are astonishing. Previously I'd only seen them in books, post cards or posters. The custodian gave a broad grin when the lift doors opened and I gasped at the size of the paintings, no doubt sensing a rube among the sensitive bohemian gallery goers that normally frequent the place.

They were all impressive, but also had that subtle Hopper menace. Not just a sense of isolation or loneliness, but the real sense that waiting, just out of picture, is a serial killer. Of course such a sensation is unfounded, unless Hopper himself was the malign presence always just out of shot...except in self portraits. Much more likely to be a serial killer is the sort of person who goes fluently to the exhibition pretending to be a sensitive bohemian.


Of course they were not all disturbing. One painting totally devoid of menace and instead suffused with charm was 'Early Sunday morning', a picture of a typical street in a small town anywhere in America. The painting is to art what Ray Bradbury's stories are to literature, evoking a nostalgic time, a golden age in the life of small town America that may or may not have actually existed but, mythical or not, is instantly recognisable. Hopper blurred the writing on the storefronts in a deliberate act of making the street anonymous. He did such a good job that I think the place resembles not only a small town I passed through once on a visit to Colorado but also a little place I know in the Cotswolds.

The gallery is also home to early photographs of New York city, antique black and white images of steam and skyscrapers that could have been taken yesterday.

As well as Hopper, the are contemporaries of his exhibited here also. The Charles Burchfield paintings were of shopfronts and streets in the snow, essentially depicting the sort of towns that H P Lovecraft used to write about, looking like they were pictured just before everything kicked off in the tentacle and madness department. He's in good company here. If Hopper's early paintings are Ray Bradbury, his later ones are Stephen King. All that's missing from 'Gas' is the shadow of a Lurker. The paintings are fascinating to look at, but I'm not sure I'd want one hanging in my house, they are definite candidates for the sort of pictures that the owner starts to notice disquieting changes in and are usually purchased from Peter Cushing in a portmanteau horror film from the 1970's.


Top prize for disquieting painting? 'Blue evening'. The image alone is terrifying enough, with the scariest clown ever in the centre of the composition, smoking (what's the only thing scarier than a clown? A clown with a fag on), but my travelling companion managed to ratchet up the tension by asking: 'did the audio guide mention a clown? I don't think it mentioned a clown. What if we are the only people that can see the clown, what if when they make reproductions of this thing there is no clown, just an empty chair? Why are you crying?'.

Can you see the clown? If so, it doesn't mean that everyone can see the clown, it just means that you can see the clown too!


The other curious painting is one of a shop with an unclear purpose. Hopper's wife called it a 'blind pig', that is, a shopfront that was essentially camouflaging a speakeasy. Of course, let's have a sinister term to describe what was, up until I heard that, a rather good picture of a shop in the sunshine.

Postcard from New York City - Times Square

Times Square is magical, an amazing place where the city begins to cast a spell. The billboards are not just electronic, or tickers, they are moving images the size of tennis courts. Recognising its charms, it has a viewing platform where you can watch the advertising billboards, like a show. Best time to go is sunset, when the light drains out of the sky and the neon wash becomes more pronounced. With all this clutter, advertisers work hard at getting you to look at their billboard, one having the genius idea to have a camera rigged to a huge screen that puts the crowd in the picture and then superimposes a giant woman walking into the square. I have no idea what it was advertising, I was too busy taking the photograph of my pixalated image, waving and expressing shock at the attack of the fifty foot woman.



Possibly the reason that al the bars in the city are so gloomy is because all the energy, or light bulbs, is being used in Times Square. Certainly, looking at the place, you would think that America doesn't give a shit about the energy crisis. So there's me using my energy efficient light bulbs at home, with the result that my front room looks like it's being viewed underwater, while here in this city they have decided to go down the route of conspicuous consumption. And they do love their gloomy bars. Even the lobby of our hotel was apparently lit my a single forty watt bulb. Is this to save on electricity, or cleaning? Some bars I can understand being dimly lit but surely every single one can't be used of illicit assignations? And what if you spend twenty minutes flirting with somebody before you realise that they've been talking to the wrong person?


This is a city of sights no doubt, but also a city of smells, the most common being burning pretzel, closely followed by frying onion and falafel coming from just about every street corner where the hot dog cart vendors have branched out. The pretzels are truly amazing. New Yorkers have taken something that is supposed to be a bar snack and turned it into a main by the simple expedient of supersizing it until it's the size of a steering wheel of a small car. It's also a city of sound, the predominant one being a local shouting into a mobile phone, always sounding more like an opinion than one end of a conversation.

NYC is also city of proximity, close proximity. In NYC even the buildings huddle up close to one another, the streets are never less than crowded and the cars pass one another with barely enough space for an extra coat of paint, sometimes passing so closely there must be friction.


You can see why anyone coming to the city would think that it is special, but New York needs to be careful that it does not turn into the theme park version of itself. Helping to keep a sense of reality is that the city is very much a place to live as well as a place to work or visit. Real people live in the heart of the city. It's possibly the reason why the city also appears to be totally devoid of litter, a feature which only adds to the theme park appearance.

And it's odd to see so many British bands transposed here, Pret is here, as is HSBC meaning the street features familiar corporate colours. In the New York Pret they have adapted the business model to take account of the free refills that American coffee shops offer, the coffee sits in the middle of the shop and you help yourself to refills. Can't see that catching on in London.

Postcard from New York City - Hot dogs

The hot dog cart guys are a piece of work. They stand on the street corner all day, after wheeling the carts through the NYC traffic in the morning. Apart from lunchtime, I never saw anyone, ever, buying anything from one of these guys, and even between twelve and two there was hardly ever what you'd call a queue, like you see in the movies.


What I love though is the optimism of anyone who thinks that somebody is going to want to buy a hot dog loaded with chilli sauce and onions at nine in the morning.

Postcard from New York City - NYC first impressions

Now that the twin towers have gone, when you come over the bridge from JFK and catch your first sight of the city, you are confronted with heavy metal bridges, gothic architecture and art deco skyscrapers. These are reflected back in the more modern, but smaller, steel and glass towers that intersperse them. If the heyday of a city is marked by it's tallest structure then this is a city in decline, the most prominent architectural features were built in the nineteen twenties and thirties, in the last depression.

The riveted girder bridges are an interesting contrast to the modern, elegant swooping arcs that form modern bridges in Europe. Possibly the bridges need to be on steroids because everything is bigger in America, including the super sized lardy arses of the drivers of the huge and heavy cars that pass over the structures.

Also visible in the heart of the city are vacant lots, something you would just never see in London, where construction on a new building is started the second the dust settles from the demolition of the previous one. One ingenious use that vacant lots are put to is car parking. But, this being New York, it's not just a case of a few shoddy square yards of mud and gravel being used as park up a few cars. Rather, instant multi-story car parks pop up, basically static car transporters where cars sit on, for the want of a better word, shelves. Usually a simple double decker arrangement, I did see one with three levels. Ingenious.


The entire city appears to be constructed of iconic images, every one a mini landmark. Steam venting out of the street, cops as wide as houses, yellow cabs, hot dog carts on every corner and steam pipes in the street looking like cat in the hat hats.




But the defining feature is the skyscrapers. They may have been surpassed in height elsewhere but the sheer density and variety of tall buildings here is staggering. You really do walk around constantly looking up, you can't help it. Other cities may have a single showpiece tower but New York has hundreds of the bloody things. It's quite a sensation to sit on the twenty fourth floor in your hotel room and look down on the tiny dots of people below, then look up at the distant tops of towers above.


The incongruity of the modern and antique, small and large, side by side is most pronounced when you see a church sandwiched between two skyscrapers. Churches are not small buildings, but here they look tiny. One expects the tower or spire of a church to be the tallest structure, especially if you are familiar with English villages, where a spire pops up above the treetops every few miles, dotting the countryside, ready to annoy the hell out of any nearby second-homeowners by having a two hour Sunday morning peal that starts at dawn. Not here, here the churches sit between office blocks. But somehow still manage to look imposing.

Yet New York is built on a human scale too, at least on street level, with the street vendors plying their trade with hot dogs, pretzels, gyros and halal food. And also selling children's books. One guy just had children's toys sat there on the sidewalk, with clockwork cars and helicopters whizzing round in circles around him. Maybe they do need to polish their sales technique however, as the chap drumming up trade on the sidewalk for his barber shop screamed 'shave and a haircut goddamit!' into the faces of passage by. I was so shocked I nearly went in for a bit of male grooming.

Postcard from New York City - Welcome to America

On arrival at JFK we were fingerprinted and photographed. They make you take off your glasses, which is odd because everyone knows that if you want to assume a secret identity, you keep your glasses on. There must be millions of photographs of short sighted tourists squinting to try and work out where the hell the camera is so they can peer into it. Once fingerprinted and photographed we were awaiting the secret police kicking the door in at three in the morning. Actually the immigration guy was polite enough but I thought this was a country with a reputation for welcoming anyone - except Mexicans - so this was a bit of a shock.

Postcard from New York City - Virgin Atlantic

Recession is obviously biting even the hitherto glamorous world of transatlantic air travel, with only one glass of wine per passenger the whole way. Must be because we were in economy, or because it was a dawn flight and not many people do an entire bottle of chardonay for breakfast. Instead of booze, passengers are kept pacified with the bewildering amount of entertainment available in the seat back. Not just the in flight magazine, airplane safety card and complimentary sick bag, but a mini multiplex showing films and telly programmes. Watched 'The King's Speech'. With all the hype I was a little worried that it would disappoint or at least not meet expectation. It's not as good as the hype, it's better. It's so good that it makes you want not to watch another film again that's not as good, as true, as moving or as well acted. Sitting in the middle of a crowded aircraft sobbing was probably not the best way to enjoy it but you just know that the BBC are already desperately bidding for the rights to broadcast it, scheduled for ten past three on Christmas Day if they have any imagination.

Sat belted into a seat watching movies, you become a sort of pleasure prisoner. Virgin recognise this and one of the annoying adverts that play before the movies is of a bloke sat in his seat remarking to the same sex travelling companion he refers to has his 'son' that he would very much like this sort of thing in his front room. The 'son' then goes on to extoll the virtues of Virgin media, explaining that he can get endless entertainment piped into his telly. The advert finishes before the 'dad' can correct the other fool and explain that what he really wants is to be brought endless booze and snacks by a camp steward and sod the movies.

However, there is a glimpse into a better life. One disembarks the aircraft from the very front, so you have to walk through the long and crowded corridors of economy, through the slightly less crowded premium economy until you come to the bar, and business class, and then it's forward still until you get to the first class section. Here there are not so much seats, but little pleasure pods where one can curl up in like a pampered pooch and, presumably, be brought endless glasses of champagne and swans blood while dining on cruel food. This, I think, is supposed to make you think 'next time I will upgrade'. However, having seen the upgrade prices and the cost of a first class ticket across the Atlantic, I would expect not a plastic cot but rather a four poster bed with it's own plasma telly, not so much a bar as a pub, and at least a ten minute go in the cockpit.

Surely a compromise might be reached. If the small seats in economy are the cheapest, is there not scope for further saving by simply sitting on a bar stool the whole trip?